Hello Scrubs,
Have you ever tried to contact LEGO Group or Brickset asking for the decorations/stickers (designs) of the sets released so far. LEGO would be a natural party to ask for that. On the other hand, If I am not wrong, Brickset seems to have their own good quality decorations or even some of newly released parts (at least they look quite good on relatively small pictures in their part lists) . Here it would be easier to discuss the matter, especially that Mecabricks is present on their site, so I guess you are in touch with Brickset . The reason for asking this question is that new sets are still released and there will always be a lot of work to do on the decorations and parts. And maybe the same work is and will be done twice by Mecabricks and Brickset. I realize how time consuming redrawing decorations can be, even if you have some skills and like doing it. Things would be much easier if photos could be automatically traced, and then palette colors would be applied, and I guess recently uploaded part, i.e. 3678d23, was traced as it lacks some details compared to the photo in the drop box.
Hello,
The images of sets in the Brickset database are official images provided by TLG. However in most cases, it is not really useful to redraw them. On the other hand, brickset editors often take pictures of decorated elements and sticker sheets for their reviews. The issue is that to be able to convert photos to Mecabricks decorations it is not that easy. Photos have to be taken at a certain angle which can be tricky for round elements. I contacted Huw in the past. He was OK to scan the sheets from reviewed sets for Mecabricks but it didn't really happen for now.
This is actually not really feasible to automatically trace the decorations. I spent hours trying to find a set up for illustrator but in most cases it is more work to clean it than to do it from scratch.
Regarding TLG, I am also somehow in touch with them but as you can expect, they don't share their assets that easily.
Let me suggest something. It is said that LEGO community is in general quite friendly and helpful. There are some LEGO dedicated sites or Youtube channels who review LEGO sets on daily basis. Why not to email them a request to scan in high resolution sticker sheets and decorated parts (if they have such a possibility) for your, whenever they open a new box. Surely, they may be too busy, but who knows, hopefully someone would respond positively. This would at least solve the problem of good quality photos for reference. So far I myself have not figured out how to simplify the process. BTW LEGO prints are quite often far from perfection (too much "noise" and irregular line edges) that is why it so difficult to obtain clean vectorised result, even with good quality photos.
It should be considered to ask Brickset for photos of the decorations. They almost review every new set.
@Sim Yes, it is what I did and it was ok with them. I didn't really follow up and we finally didn't really organise that yet. It is not that critical as they would basically seat in my inbox or the Mecabricks dropbox. There aren't enough people to take care of them yet.
@brixforkids Live trace only works for some of the stickers. Mainly the ones where contrast between colours is obvious. For printed element it never really works do to print quality.
LEGO, le logo LEGO, la minifigurine et les configurations des briques et tenons sont des marques déposées de LEGO Group of Companies. ©2024 The LEGO Group.
Mecabricks, le logo Mecabricks et tout le contenu non couvert par les droits d'auteur du groupe LEGO sont, sauf indication contraire, ©2011-2024 Mecabricks.